Postmodernism is a pervasive, pernicious, Nihilistic, and intellectually attractive doctrine that has come to dominate the humanities and increasingly the social sciences within universities.
It represents a profound philosophical attack seeking to blow up or replace the entire project of modernity. This intellectual system is characterised by a lack of gratitude, being driven fundamentally by resentment, arrogance, and deceit. It rejects the foundational structure of Western Civilisation completely.
Philosophical Rejection of Modernity
The core of Postmodernism lies in its rejection of Logos, which is the principle underpinning logic, reason, and the individual.
Western culture is dismissed as logo centric and phallocentric, asserting that what is seen in Western culture is the constant manifestation of a male-dominated, oppressive, self-serving society.
Postmodern thought contends that logic itself is merely a component of the patriarchal process by which Western institutions maintain and justify their dominance.
There is no belief that people of goodwill can reach consensus through the exchange of ideas; this notion of dialogue is dismissed as a philosophical practice of the dominant culture.
Postmodernists are fundamentally convinced that the modern project has failed, both intellectually and culturally. They assert that people are not rational beings and are not truly individuals. Instead, fundamental identity is group fostered, meaning one is essentially an exemplar of one’s race, gender, sex, or ethnicity.
The individual is regarded as a mere vehicle through which external social forces operate, akin to a lump of plasticine shaped and manipulated by its social context.
Values are subjective, being either made up or conditioned by random social forces, thereby eliminating any objective basis for truth or knowledge. In this framework, objective truth, morality, and virtue are constantly assaulted.
The Post-Marxist Shift
The philosophical trajectory of Postmodernism was heavily influenced by the failures of classical Marxism. The argument that the world was a battleground between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat lost all philosophical and ethical standing after the working class saw its standard of living massively elevated as a consequence of Western corporate democracy and free enterprise. Furthermore, revelations of the murderous poverty and depression generated by communist states demonstrated the failure of the Marxist system.
By the 1970s, it was evident that the original Marxist game was over. Postmodern Marxist thinkers executed a sleight-of-hand: the political struggle was redefined from the poor versus the rich to the oppressed against the oppressor.
This involved redefining subpopulations based on identity markers such as race and gender. Consequently, the world is viewed as a Hobbesian battleground of identity groups that are deemed incapable of communicating with one another. All that remains in human relations is a constant struggle for power. If one belongs to the predator group, which signifies being an oppressor, one is not welcome, nor are one’s ideas.
Language, Power, and Truth
The philosophical core of Postmodernism rests upon a set of specific theories regarding language and knowledge developed by key thinkers:
Scepticism Towards Meta-Narratives: Jean-François Lyotard defined Postmodernism as a skepticism towards meta-narratives—the large, overarching, historically situated cultural stories presented as universal truths. These include science, Christianity, and Marxism. Lyotard argued for replacing these grand narratives with multiple _mini narratives_ and multiple _knowledges_, rejecting the authoritative method of science and promoting moral and factual relativism.
Deconstruction and Binaries:
Jacques Derrida focused intensely on language, arguing that meaning is indefinitely deferred, as words only refer to other words. He contended that words are used comparatively, establishing binaries where one term (e.g., man) is deemed superior to the other (e.g., woman), reinforcing power hierarchies. The reversal of these binaries is advocated as a way to challenge these hierarchies, potentially leading to sexism against men or Racism against White people, which is justified as a way of redressing the balance.
Power-Knowledge and Discourses:
Michel Foucault’s concepts of Episteme, power-knowledge, discourses, and biopower are widely applied. Foucault rejected the modernist definition of knowledge as an accurate understanding of objective reality. Instead, knowledge is understood as a cultural construct—a system (Episteme) devised by those in power to set the parameters of truth.
Therefore, what is known by society is merely an exercise of power: power-knowledge. This power-knowledge is constructed and perpetuated through discourses, which are the ways of talking about things that legitimise certain claims. Biopower is a specific form of power-knowledge where science is utilised as the legitimising discourse.
Authoritarian Manifestation
The political manifestation of Postmodernism is explicitly authoritarian. Since rational debate is impossible when values are subjective, political contests inevitably degrade into a power struggle settled by physical force. Modern authoritarianism, unlike historical forms, is based on explicit subjectivity, where power is used solely to make subjective value commitments prevail.
The concept that words are violence proliferates within this framework, resting on the idea that the individual is not an autonomous agent. Since the individual is viewed as a passive vehicle shaped by social forces, words are deemed capable of inflicting harm. The response to harmful words is considered beyond the individual’s control. Certain terms, such as _racist_ or _fascist_, are used as rhetorical weapons to shut down debate and place opponents on the defensive, exploiting emotional buttons.
Evolution of Postmodern Thought
Postmodernism has developed through several distinct phases since its inception in the late 1960s.
High Deconstructive Phase (1970s–mid-1980s):
The initial phase was intensely Nihilistic, aimless, ironic, and pessimistically playful. It deconstructed everything, leading to despair and hopelessness about achieving anything authentic.
Theorists diagnosed a society that had lost the real and was merely recycling copies, existing in a state of _hyper real_ simulation. This phase was aimless because there was no confidence in reconstruction, which would merely produce new oppressive power structures.
Applied Postmodernism (Late 1980s–c. 2010):
A new generation of leftist academics emerged, finding ways to make postmodern concepts politically actionable. This phase saw the rise of theories such as post-colonial theory, intersectionality, and queer theory.
This movement adopted postmodern techniques as tools, but conceded that oppressive cultural constructs needed to be accepted as objectively real in order for activism to function. Queer theory, for instance, used the deconstruction of categories as a form of activism, reifying specific queer identities while dismantling normative ones.
This phase was characterised by acknowledging and justifying its departure from the original nihilistic postmodernists, who were often dismissed as privileged White men.
Rarefied Postmodernism (Post-2015):
This contemporary phase is marked by absolute certainty, clarity, and a rigid refusal to accept disagreement, which is interpreted as resistance. The original ideas are now treated as sacred creeds of objective truth.
Scholarship in this phase constructs elaborate theoretical concepts built upon one another that often bear little relation to reality. Concepts such as _White privilege_, _White complicity_, and _White fragility_ form a closed ideological system. _White fragility_, for instance, defines any disagreement, silence, or withdrawal by a White person when confronted about complicity in Racism as evidence of fragility, thus eliminating any valid way to disagree with the conception of society.
This stage acts as a call to arms, making clear statements of absolute certainty and objective knowledge, claiming that racism is an institutionalised, multi-level system that benefits all White people regardless of their intentions.